


Stripes

by jackmarlowe



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-14
Updated: 2012-05-14
Packaged: 2017-11-05 08:19:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/404290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Afghanistan, Sebastian Moran supposes he'll get himself an English job and isn't too impressed, at first, with an Irish boss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stripes

**Author's Note:**

> My take on the modern Sebastian Moran is a bit different from most; I've tried to update him from the Doyle canon as literally as possible, i.e. taking a gambling imperalist shikari bastard and turning him into a racist West Ham supporter of a veteran. He is no longer upper-class, though he likes the rugby.
> 
> This is just prose-y, la dee da. I am not sure where I'm going with it, or indeed if it's not already done.

Seb Moran had never been an Irishman. They had a few in the regiment – Belfast boys were still fucking micks, looking at it, talk the leprechaun talk and you weren’t really one of the lads. Moran was an Irish name, people who didn’t know him sometimes said on meeting him, but fucked if they didn’t know Seb Moran with the VC tattooed in little beneath where the real thing hung on parade (other plans in the works – St. George’s Cross, the three lions). When Ireland won the rugby a few years ago, Seb Moran went patrolling outside the Green Zone and earned himself a formal reprimand shooting three hostiles execution-style. Apprehended setting up an IED, was his cool explanation. Ronan O’Gara beating Wales by two points, was the unspoken understanding in the barracks.

Seb sounded East London, which was what he was. He forgot it sometimes in Afghanistan where he was Colonel, Boss, or the infidel – coming home, people cared more about his accent than they did to know his name. Posh blokes threw him sideways looks when he answered his mobile too loud and chavvy birds gave him the knowing glance, _innit_ , there’s a Peckham boy. So what? Seb took quiet pride in it until he got himself his first proper civvy job after Afghanistan and it became a thorn in his side, suddenly, his peculiar drawl coupled with the Irish _Moran_. This was because the new boss had an Irish name too, and unlike Seb he did not care about how he sounded.

He came in late one day, slamming the door of their shitey little flat so hard white paint fell from the lintel and Seb blinked from his armchair. West Ham blared from the telly, up by two against Millwall with the crowd howling for blood. Before Seb could hit the mute button, the boss in his sharp dark suit had the TV on the ground in a sparking static mess, fine teeth bared and shoes tangled in glass and wire.

Being an East Londoner watching West Ham, Seb shot up fists clenched: this was all he was allowed to do. The boss watched him, chin up, narrow chest heaving, daring him, and finally brushed his palms together with a bared ermine grin.

‘I thought we’d redecorate. Come on, _boyo_ , we’re going shopping!’

Seb slowly went to get his gun and a dustpan. They took the car, Seb driving, hating him with his poof suit and how his slicked-back head turned watching certain cars go by on the motorway. He tended to hate all sorts after coming back from the desert, but the boss was fuck-off kinds of mad and merited some caution even then. Those were early days.

Moriarty – for that was his name, and his accent was from Dublin, though only by a hint – paid him to shoot people a sight better than the Brigadiers. He was not Real IRA, as the rumours originally went south of the Thames, so Seb had no moral qualms about doing in bankers, politicians, and less legal criminals for him. Just for starters, that. After six months, the boss trusted him, or something like it, with the stranger cases. He did not trust him to buy his milk of choice (the green kind, M&S) for a year, though Seb did the weekly shop and fed them too. That had been worse than Kabul, learning to cook.

‘Seb,’ he said suddenly one evening from the couch. This snapped his attention from chopping potatoes faster than a gunshot, as the boss never used his name.

‘Yeah, Boss?’

‘I want you to go out and get the paper.’

‘What paper you after, Boss?’

‘The evening one.’

‘There’re a few, innit. _Evening Standard_ if you’re after Will and Kate, _The Guardian_ if you’re goin’ ‘round the Palace for a latte and that.’ Seb glanced over his shoulder to the fingers drumming warnings into the worn green cushions. ‘I’m going.’

‘No no _no_ , shut up, forget it.’ Moriarty shifted his bare legs beneath him, restless, thrusting his face at his phone and hunching his shoulders beneath a thin T-shirt.

After a long moment in which the water for the potatoes gurgled and Seb considered just mashing them and being done with it, the boss hissed audibly and tossed the phone on the table. This meant news from across the river, looking at him halfway. Seb saw his pupils contract and his knuckles whiten and knew to go and grab his arms before he moved.

He was harder to hold down than soldiers, whose helpless bodies could get rank screamed and pummelled into them by a superior officer when their battle-brains lost it and kicked off. The boss slipped between frequencies – after thirty seconds, Seb thought he was done and was bitten for his trouble, blood welling up on his hand so quick and exquisitely painful he could do nothing but lunge and pin him to the couch. This, though he’d learned the hard way not to lay a fucking finger on Moriarty, the things he could do.

The boss’s eyes went wide and white for a moment, staring at him, slightly surprised, huffing a breathless laugh into the dark. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he chuckled, swaying amiably side-to-side. ‘Oh, Seb. Look at _you_ , going all soldier on me. Do they skin people in Afghanistan, baby? ‘Cause I want that medal on my _wall_.’

He was mad in a way not like boys who came back from Afghanistan. Seb resented him for this. The boss never drank and wasn’t often inclined to do his killing firsthand, which Seb Moran considered a profound fucking embarrassment for a man even in this day and age. You learned knives first. You kicked in scummy heads when the football ended badly. You joined the army and studied the specifics of violence whilst public school wankers headed to Oxbridge and spent less time on physics – same sort of thing, though, cause and effect. This was sweet fucking gospel, mate, Jesus. This was convention and respectable, and Moriarty did not fit in.

It wasn’t, he thought, looking through the scope at Moriarty’s two-blocks-away hands flitting against his crosshairs, that he thought the Irish bastard was all right. Maybe he’d gone a bit mad himself to live with him – gone off, gone soft. But when _Well, Moran?_ purred in his ear, he squeezed the trigger without breathing and the other body behind the neatly-cracked two-blocks-away window punched sexual satisfaction into his gut as it fell.

That was combat again, all over and very sudden. Seb inhaled and slipped the rifle through his arms to the floor. This was why he stayed. Only Moriarty made him feel like a proper hooligan again, decorated with his own tattoo, a real fighting Englishman. It was a little like Afghanistan, and nothing else came fucking close.


End file.
